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I don’t know about anyone else, but the default sound limitations are a tad too conservative for my laptop. The sound is so faint at times I can hardly hear it on my Razer Blade 2015. So if you want to boost the sound you can enable it past 100%, but be warned you also run the risk of harming your speakers if you aren’t careful.

So if you wish to proceed simply install Kmix if you are using Kubuntu and then enable “Overdrive”, you can do that by clicking on the system tray icon for sound, which you might have two now since Kmix isn’t normally installed any more and then clicking on the config button in the bottom right hand corner. Then click on the General icon in the window that pops open. You should then see a checkbox that is the “Enable Overdrive”

After this point you have to restart kmix/pulseaudio. You can easily do that by simply restarting, or if you know how just restart it manually.

I often to backups before big changes to my system, or just hacks that I am not sure if it will blow up my system.

Sometimes I run Unity from time to time and I am not sure if other back systems run in a similar fashion, but I assume they do. The program I used for this particular back up was Gnome Disks. Since I am normally a KDE user I had to figure out how to mount the img file without being in a GTK environment.

Fourtantely it is fairly easy to do. Just three commands.

This mounts the image.

sudo losetup -f -P DiskImage.img

This displays the devices partition layout and assignments.

lsblk -f

This mounts the partition table. Make sure you change /dev/loop0p7 to your device.

A lot of the time in Windows 10 you have to deal with an issue where it doesn’t completely close the drive so that it can “fash-boot” and unlucky for us Linux developers actually respect this setting without clobbering it. Because in all actuality it might be an important thing to pay attention to. For example if you suspended the drive making alterations may effect your next wake up event. So if you need to access the drive and you don’t want to jump into Windows and disable that feature all together so you can access the data from Linux you can use 1 simple command and mount the drive in read-only mode.

udisksctl mount –block-device /dev/sda1 –options ro

If you don’t know the part that is /dev/sda1 would be your drive. You can figure out which drive is which by using :

I got an error in my tmux session that was effecting my work flow in vim as well as just general konsole sessions while search apt, or whatever. I thought I would share the solution in case some one ran into the problem.

Basically they made a trivial change, probably a micro level change that really bothered a programmer and their pet project. Totally understandable, but it is just too bad I didn’t hear about it and it is hard to track these things down. I suppose I will make more of an effort to check up on these things when upgrading to the next LTS. Right now I went from Kubuntu14.04 to Kubuntu16.04.

Any way lets get to it. Simply change :

set -g mode-mouse on

to

set -g mouse on

Now you will have the ability to scroll with the trackpad, or mouse if on a desktop. This should only effect users coming from a version less then 2.1, since that is when the change took effect.

A common saying around the Linux community is that it is less likely you will get a virus. Some people even claim you can’t get any, but I think most Linux users know viruses/malware/nasty stuff do exist for Linux and we need to be security minded just like any other computer user regardless of software running on the machine. One major problem I think some times people forget about is this awesome yet dangerous program called Wine. It is a combatability layer that doesn’t have any sandboxing at all. If it works on Windows you just opened yourself up to a much wider variety of issues. The vast majority of desktop users are OSX and Windows users so this can keep us little Linux guys some what safe just because it serves little purpose to target us. As Linux matures on the desktop and gains more adoption I think we need to start taking a look at what this attack vector could mean and how we could help users by limiting exposure.

Here is an interesting Ubuntu forum post I found while researching I thought everyone reading might get a kick out of it and prove some what educational. It is a little old, but still fun. Have a read – http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=72598

If you have any ideas how people should protect themselves while still using Wine please comment below, or send me an email.

I was at one point a person that liked something and would go all in. I am the type of person that really likes to try everything and make the best use of products and services to make my life more enjoyable. I liked a lot of things about Apple products. For example in comparison to a Windows based desktop I can easily install applications using homebrew, or mac ports. Most unix style Linux applications would work pretty easily. Everything seemed very polished and stable for the most part for what I do on a daily basis. It wasn’t until I had an update that suddenly my dream of working on my Macbook Air and using Apple TV with an iPhone started to give me a bad experience.

It seems the extensive integration of products only goes so far. For example most people with apple TV, MBA(mac), and iPhone will quickly discover is they aren’t integrated very well at least if you are watching/listening to podcasts. This for me is a major issue as I like to watch podcasts quite often as opposed to regular television. I asked for help from the community, but got none. You can see that here.

This wasn’t a total drag for me as all these systems were newer and maybe I would be getting some updates that would help these issues. I would just do some air streaming until then so my podcasts would stay synced.

The issue that really made my head spin that I wanted to share should probably be prefaced with some additional information in case you weren’t aware. I am a programmer by trade and at the time I was working on a web project using LAMP related technologies. like PHP, JS, HTML, and the like. Any way, I have a lot of programs that aren’t App store “Approved”. I had to go into my MBA and tell OSX I wanted it to allow me to install software that isn’t “Approved” which is ok what ever. It wasn’t until this horrible update came and completely removed all of my non-“Approved” applications.

At that point I couldn’t use it any more. I had literally tons of intricate settings that make it a real hassle to setup your dev environment. Now I know a few people are going to say backup off site, or cloud storage, but honestly I don’t want to have to spend any time worrying about those things especially on a work machine. I want to come into the office, work, and go home. As most people I don’t get paid to goof around with my system. I get paid for results. I’ve heard some people having this issue and others tell me I am crazy, but it happened to me and after that my love for everything Apple quickly vanished.

I’ve used various flavors of Linux like Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch as well as Windows and generally I love Linux, but I find myself loving to tinker with it rather then doing work. One good thing about not liking Windows as much is that it is great when you just want to do some work. Any way, I am back in the PC/Linux world and honestly it seems to be what works best for me. I’d love to hear what other people like and think.